first day

So it’s happened. I’ve been talking about it every damn day for a whole damn year (sorry, everyone who had to listen to me. Thanks for still being friends with me even though I suck), and it’s finally happened. Ladies and gentlemen and friends who don’t identify as either, I am coming to you live from my 6^th (which is actually 7^th – more on this later #justeuropethings) floor studio in Paris, France.

Despite being still in bed at 4:30pm very sick and very hungry on my second day here, I can confirm that Paris is a magical city and I love it already. My flight was lovely, thanks for asking. The plane was hardly at a third of capacity (due to… reasons, probably) and I had a whole centre row to myself. I built myself a little nest, laid down across the three seats, had myself a nice little Netflix n wine party, and befriended all the flight attendants. When I got to the airport, I learned lesson number one: Canadian naivety runs deeper than I thought.

As I left the baggage claim area, hands firmly clutching my purse to protect against all the pickpocketers I was warned against, eyes widened in search of signs pointing me in the right direction (telltale signs of a tourist), a nice man was kindly directing people looking for taxis to a downstairs parking lot. I changed my trajectory and headed in that direction before a small French woman in a blue “Taxi” vest intercepted me. She shook her small French fists at the man and yelled, “You’re a fraud! Stop scamming people, you fake taxi! You’re not a real taxi, WE’RE the real taxis!” except in French, which made it all the more exciting. Apparently, this guy and his crew were charging double the typical taxi fare, and probably also stealing kidneys or something idk, a fate I only barely escaped. Thanks, French taxi lady. And that is the story of how I almost got scammed within my first hour of arriving in Paris. Riveting, I know.

So I finally get in a (legitimate) taxi (whose driver was a very aggressive man), and I’m just falling in love with every corner of this city. The architecture is beautiful, of course, but even the graffiti on the sides of abandoned walls is stunning. I reached my apartment where my landlady had instructed me to meet her on the fourth floor. The apartment has no elevator, so I dragged all my stuff up to the fourth floor, except it wasn’t, because in France, the first floor is actually floor 0 and so I was actually still on the third – which became apparent and very awkward when I knocked on some poor confused girl’s door, still breathless and wheezing.

views from the 6th

Anyway, my landlady finally found me and showed me to my room, which is a charming studio just a 20 minute walk from Sciences Po (which is basically like the distance from Totem to the bus loop so really, I’m not complaining). Well, it’s supposed to be only 20 minutes. My SIM card isn’t getting delivered for another week, so for the time being, I’m (barely) surviving off wifi. But this also means that directions (which I am famously terrible at) are even more of a struggle than usual.

After getting lost several times (and also stopping for the most delicious sandwich I have ever had in my life, probably), it ended up taking me a solid 45 minutes to get to school in time for a welcome presentation in which the Sciences Po equivalents to the AMS, Rec, and some Arts Council (they’re so much more cultured than us) gave presentations in fairly broken English, and the President gave an address which included about 150 years of French history (at this point, the jet lag got the better of me and I may or may not have fallen asleep a little). Afterwards, I met up with another girl from UBC (who had arrived a month earlier and who has been very patient with my bothering her several times a week about questions that I could probably just Google – thanks Sophie).

We ran some errands together which included the most expensive grocery shopping ever, bonded over our mutual guilt at still watching Pretty Little Liars, and went for dinner. At this point, I would like to shout-out to Caroline for introducing Yelp into my life because I found the cutest little French bistro on it (four and a half stars according to some 200 reviews, a rating which I wholeheartedly agree with). I am now going to passionately describe the food we ate in excruciating detail (and excessive use of the word “perfect” in all its iterations), so please feel free to skip over this if you’re not into that kind of thing.

To start, Sophie took a leap of faith and tried the obligatory escargots (you go girl!) which she assures me were excellent. I had the French onion soup and it was amazing. The onions were slowly caramelized and lent a great depth of flavour to the broth, which was rich and hearty but not greasy. It was, of course, topped with toasted baguette and plenty of gruyere, perfectly seasoned, and absolutely delicious. For me this was followed by duck breast seared to a perfect medium topped with mushrooms and a red wine reduction that made me feel things I’ve never felt before, served with a sweet potato puree and purple yam chips. I also tried some of Sophie’s salmon “à la planchette” with squid ink pasta and white wine cream sauce – perfectly balanced and so, so lovely. Dessert was an apple millefeuille composed of puff pastry, dulce de leche, caramelized apple, coffee ice cream, and crème anglaise. It was perfect. Apple and caramel is a classic pair, but the introduction of coffee elevated this to a level I had never before imagined possible. Maybe there is a God.

Omnipresent supernatural being or not, we made our way to a weird little bar after dinner where the BDE (Bureau des Élèves aka AMS) was hosting an international student mingler. The bar was packed but we befriended a modest smattering of characters, including a black guy from Detroit who spoke English, French, Spanish, nearly perfect Chinese (to my great surprise), and also apparently Korean, a crazy Singaporean fellow that reminded me a whole lot of my good friend Sunny, as well as a French party crasher who actually attends Dauphine, Sciences Po’s rival school (Harvard and Yale of France, as he so described it), and who we later spotted very aggressively making out with someone even though it really wasn’t “that kind” of party. Sophie and I called it quits at around midnight (I was falling asleep again), and we got lost several times on the way home. It’s hard to navigate when the streets span out like a spiderweb instead of in a grid with 90-degree angles. I got locked out of my apartment because for some reason the key code wasn’t working (which is the story I’m sticking with even though the more likely explanation was that I was really really drunk tired), so I had to wake up my landlady’s kid to let me in, which was equal parts sad and embarrassing. I slept like a log till about 2pm, at which point I wasted some time on the internet and lurked my JDCWest team whatsapp chat (I miss you guys and the FOMO is so real, I hope you’re all having the best time at Revelstoke, please snap me all your bad decisions) instead of exploring and doing Paris things and stuff, which I forgive myself for only because I am very sick – no doubt a by-product of overexerting myself in Saskatoon last weekend (#noragrets).

It is now almost 6 and I have still not eaten and I am currently debating whether or not it’s worth getting out of bed to do so. My discussing this at all means that I have run out of interesting things to say and therefore that this post should really be drawing to a close (as if it wasn’t already way longer than it needs to be). Before that, though, I’d like to take this moment to apologize in advance for how obnoxious I am going to be on social media for the next few months and then irl for the rest of my life. Please give me at least a month after I get back but after that, I duly grant you written permission to smack me every time I start a sentence with “Oh my god, when I was in Paris…” (if you know me at all you already know how I’m saying it). I hate myself a little already, but I’m not really that sorry. Here’s to the start of the best few months of my life.